The Economic Times website sucks

While writing the previous post, I had all kinds of trouble with the ET website. Specifically,

• It is difficult to find articles on the website. For example, the Bangalore edition carried today two short, crisp, and very good columns by Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze; it also carried a few reports about educating street children, the efficacy of the mid-day meal scheme, and alternative schools (such as Bangalore's Centre for Learning). Finding these reports and columns on ET's website has been impossible. The search function on the site is atrociously dysfunctional.
• ET doesn't seem to like Google News; I hardly find ET featured in the latter when I search for stuff -- even stuff that I'm sure was carried by the paper. Today, for example, I searched specifically for John Dreze; ET was not among the links.
• Finally, the articles that I linked to (in my previous post) were all written by specific people. On the website, however, you will find only a few of them with the names of the authors. Even here, there's no uniformity. Kiran Karnik and Rahul Dravid get their names upfront and just below the title, while Ananthamurthy's name appears at the bottom, at the end of the article. The worst, of course, is when the author's name is completely left out! Pratap Bhanu Mehta and C.N.R. Rao belong to this elite category. Also in this category is today's Guest Editor himself: the ET website doesn't even mention Premji's name in the web page with his editorial (which, in the print edition, appeared with his signature!).

The ET website sucks. Big Time.